


a heart no home can hold

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-12-05 18:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11583357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: For the good of the universe, Shiro and Keith settle down and raise baby dragons together. Look, it’s complicated.





	a heart no home can hold

**Author's Note:**

> do you ever get so stircrazy staring at a bloated monster of a current draft that you start scrabbling through previously unposted works just to have the relief of looking at something new on your account? no? thank god. i'd hate to think there were two of us brats on this earth.
> 
> originally written for the [sheithsecretsanta2016](https://tmblr.co/moKMK4jNuJKOMlp0y6ATawg) exchange. true to the spirit of my original late-late- _late_ submission, this is getting archived seven months after the fact. everything on the exchange's still well-worth a look, though, if you're in need of things to ogle and read!
> 
> consider this some kind of nebulous missionfic floating somewhere in the aether of season 1.

“I think there’s something wrong with them.”

The smile comes second. First, a luxury: Shiro tips his head up and back, leans it against Keith’s. Takes the felt flare of temper-displeasure- _reflex_ , basks in it as it’s bolted down. “Try not to say that in front of the kids. You’re a parent now. You could really damage their confidence.”

Keith elbows him, jars a rib or two. “Next time Voltron gets called out to take a challenge on an alien planet,” he says, “I’m taking Hunk.”

Shiro laughs, a ghost’s puff that dissolves between the lanterns. His fingertips hiss across a page—but louder is Keith’s temper, his brows knitting thunder. Keith out of the Garrison’s just a bigger version of the gangling, bristling boy that’d stormed into it. Reshaped, not remade.  _The mood makes the man_ —it sounds about right for a pilot with cut-glass eyes, his elbows all-bone and his shoulders pushed high as hackles. Posed like the animals Shiro used to see by the town garbage cans, at the backs of cages. Little beasts, all fangs and ribs and fury.

Luckily Shiro knows how to hold himself, too:  _steady, steady_ , one hand anchored as he sinks back, feels the static bow of Keith’s spine go easy with his weight. Together they sit in the hollow heart of Teythra’s greatest library, stripped mute in a white desert winter.

After their holy volcano burned itself dry, Teythra’s believers rose in armies to remake it. Century after century they worked: rooting willow-trees to grow green-blue-green along the shivered tracks where magma had cooled; cutting walkways and shelves out of the sulfur-yellow walls, its crooks and crevices, and all the way down into the deepest parts of a world where the earth had learned to burn. Stranded at the core of a wasteland, the library makes for a dangerous trek: three days’ travel from the chrome-capped towers of the capital to reach the first plots where the land’s started its weedy awakening. Then the descent: easing heel after heel along the narrowest parts of the path with your spine lined tight against stone, seizing rough handholds to get to the little boats that’ll lower you into the deeps and the platforms where the library’s shelves stand waiting.

 _Wisdom demands price, always,_ the prime minister told them.  _It means being open to wind and rain and risk. If the mind can be incautious of its feet, who’s to say it’ll be more careful of its knowledge?_

A whistling breeze carves along the outcrops, loops a shadow above his head. Shiro reaches up, knots fingers around the whisper of a willow branch. The midway shelves are more tree than etched stone. Overhead sways a canopy of books: fat volumes in glittering rows, stone-bound and feathered alike, looped by pruned boughs or perched in narrow slots like birds. Lamps stud the walls, all buttery gleaming. There’s no glimpse of sky.

Behind him, Keith grinds out a soft sound. Kicks out his legs, displeased. By his heel a tower of paperbacks trembles and teeters—but in a heartbeat he’s flashed forward, slammed a palm down before it starts to topple. There’s an enormous volume splayed over his knees, frothing with pages. Shiro curls his own hand; the metal’s laid bare by the hush, whispering like dust pattering, or insects. Firefly sounds. The rain that lingers just after a storm. Far-off as constellations, infinitesimal. Nothing to touch.

 _Downtime makes you soft,_ the commanders used to say—but that was before. These days, it just undoes him.

“We should probably check on them in the next few hours,” he tells a filigreed bud, then lets it slither from his pinching. “I managed to get them down before I left, but Midori was looking all over the cave for you.”

Keith flicks him a look. His shoulders are a long seam, untrimmed with anything like fear or exhaust. “I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m some kind of chewtoy.”

 _Do dragons have chewtoys?_ Shiro doesn’t say. Keith provokes non-sequiturs but grumbles about chasing them. Too practical to practice his literalism. “Could be she’s just charmed. You’re going to be in trouble when she figures out those boats.”

“Shiro,” Keith says, hunching up, stump-like on the outcrop. “I’m fine.”

 _Caught_. Shiro takes a moment to smooth over his own volume, some study tangling statistics and mythology behind the history of sweets on Teythra. “No one’s expecting you,” he says with some care, “to come up with the answer in a couple days.”

“ _Six_ days. That’s a lot more than a couple.” The book’s a drowsing thing beneath Keith’s fist: lightless, noiseless, answerless. “You heard them: they used to have champions who studied for years just to do this. Hatching the dragons. Finding the one thing on this planet that’ll feed each generation. It’s been three hundred years since the last time—we don’t have time to catch up on their research. These people only wrecked the land outside the library a century ago. What if that changed something about the Trial? What if this time, they’ll need something from the outside?”

That carries the thoughtless sting of a reprimand—but that’s Keith for you. A voice that begs for scraped palms, a bruise to ripen like a plum across one cheek.  _Before you get too cozy with him, Shirogane, you should see what he did to the other kid._  Never met a fight he couldn’t pick, and fights caught him time and again, came to meet him out of a thousand prompts like these.

“Keith,” he says.

Keith hunches. “You know,” he says, and his knifing voice gives way to something rougher. “They barely cracked those shells.”

“The Tey'thra have been doing this for thousands of years,” Shiro says. “I’m not saying raising three baby dragons isn’t a challenge—but they don’t call it a Trial for nothing.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“I don’t expect it to be. I’m just saying: for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never let me down. I know you’ll do the same thing for them.”

“I—” One moment, two. But they’ve seen alien stars bursting, run jagged through asteroid rings, fought battle after battle in a war millennia-old with nothing to back them but a legend. These days, doubt’s harder to come by.

Keith breathes out. He closes the book with a puff of dust. Shoves it into a nook before he snags another. “It’s a good thing they sent two of us, for once.”

All fists and thin shoulders, built to carry his own weight and to live alone in the desert, but unable to bear letting anyone down.  _He contradicts himself, he contains multitudes,_ like a shape cut out of a story, this sharp-spined figure who’d been the Garrison’s heedless flyboy, who’d memorised flight plans and once tumbled through Shiro’s window the night before exams, reeking of engine oil and desert. Who’d snapped across the cave when they’d come, slammed his fist into the first egg’s weak fissures—caught the skeletal slip of a body as it slid from the shell, steam-quick, cupped the thrashing limbs as the scaled wings furled and sputtered and flared—

“Let’s read for another half-hour,” he says instead. “Based on the last week, we’ve probably got about that long before they start getting restless. You can come up just for dinner. The books’ll wait.”

A glance tilts back to him. Sparks with it the flicker of a grin, rarer now in these bright war days, running on exhaust and half-wild hopes. Shiro looks away. “Maybe,” he hears. “If you called someone who can actually cook.”

With care, Shiro slouches back. Imagines, for a moment, that Keith could take the impact. “All right, nose to the grindstone,” he sighs, but he’s smiling too. “Punk.”

##  *****

Morning pours lurid gold into their honeycombed rooms along the volcano’s red-crowned rim. Keith gets to pry three sulky, comfortable little dragons who've stitched themselves into their nest, while Shiro coaxes the calling room’s centuries-old ivory station to connect to the world outside for supplies and status reports. Tey'thra’s minister had set only three restrictions: they can’t leave the volcano’s grounds until the end of the challenge. They’re granted a call outside once in every six days, which cannot be used to ask for the history of past champions. They aren’t to harm the dragons.

_We have every faith in you. In every rite, the children have answered to the hearts of their champions._

A trial, maybe, but a pretty simple one.

 _Grounded_ , Shiro thinks, like testing a step over new ice. For the time being, anyway. Through the farthest wall gleams a white-ridged winter, all crags and drifts. From time to time, Keith’s shouts shake the pale shadows, caught between laughter and surprise slid off-guard. Full in the way that you only get planetside and damn, the way it rings—Shiro nearly stops midword just to listen.  _Silence’s_ one of the things he doesn’t miss about the stars and the black. The castle halls kept some of it at bay, but still they carried space in their marrows, close enough to feel echoes of what they had been ten thousand years before.

Forget that. There’d been other windows, once upon a time. A grime-freckled pane, pale-barred. Kids kicking a basketball around a cracked grey cul-de-sac and hopping after it loud as crows. On leave, he’d pressed his fingers to glass and wondered at the touch:  _I’m going to go far away enough to miss you, and be back before the ache gets bad._

Funny how things play out.

Keith’s still grumbling laughter by the time he stumbles down the winding steps. The automated wall-heater pulls a deepening breath as he drops to the foot of the green-cut stair; its panels glow yellow-silver-red, charging. “ _Off_ ,” Keith snaps, and squelches wet bootmarks down the cavern’s pale tiles.

“Looks like you had fun.”

The jacket’s unzipped in a spatter; Keith slings it onto one of the high-backed stools; he scrubs his hair and rattles off the slush, showering two dragons as they prance. “They  _tripped_ me,” he says. Hai and Midori are still coiling about his heels, winding pearl and green possession between bouts of tiny  sneezes, shivering the ice from their armored scales. Dai trots down with the dignity of one already too old to cling, a gaudy sunstruck queen barely bigger than Shiro’s two fists. Onto the couch she hops, prickling claws into an ivory cushion; there’s a seam-splitting interval.

“Must be losing your touch,” Shiro says, milk-mild above the rampage. A smile prickles the corners of his mouth as Keith’s chin snaps up; he twitches a gesture: _come over._ “Over here. Let me take a look at those hands.”

Dripping, wary, Keith trails around the isle. “That sounds kind of like rubbing it in.”

“You mean, the way you rubbed the snow into your pants?” It’s hard to chafe with only one hand; Shiro slides a thumb against his palm and curls tight against it, fingers overlapping until Keith shifts on his heels. “You know, they said we shouldn’t hold back for this challenge—but I’m pretty sure they only meant that about doing actual research.”

“They want us to find out what to feed a couple of baby dragons. Who calls that a  _challenge_?”

“In all fairness, I think the minister was about to tell us the details. You could’ve waited to hear him out.”

“You told them  _you’d_ take it. No matter what they needed.”  Keith bites out every syllable; it isn’t only ice between his teeth. “What’d you think I was going to do?”

Wait for answers. A strategy. Understand the difference between an acceptable risk and a potential dead-end. The loss of one paladin might stagger Voltron briefly; two would core the heart out of their war. “If it makes you feel better,” Shiro says, grave to the last syllable, “they weren’t that far off. Parenthood’s one of the biggest challenges there is.”

This ratchets him all the way up to a glower, nearly real: narrowed eyes, black brows beetling, and the gritty scoff of a boy who would’ve actually taken a maze and a minotaur instead. “Maybe we should switch tomorrow,” Keith says. “I’ll dial out for the food, and  _you_ can get knocked down a hill.”

“We could try. But I don’t know if the kids like me enough for that.”

Long-suffering, Keith turns up to the ceiling. He yanks at his wrist—but not hard enough. Down he glares at his own knuckles, the way Roman wives once must have looked at their hangdog husbands who returned from war with bare arms. “Here,” Shiro says, by way of distraction. “Eat this while you warm up.”

He palms one of the plates that’d flashed into the calling station on a platter. Champions, the Tey'thra assured him, are no longer held to a strict diet during the raising rites. Nevertheless, certain things may only be eaten on the library’s holy grounds: among them a blue-veined bread whose creation provoked thirty songs, twelve sculptures, and a war.

It tastes a lot like a spiced brownie.

Begrudging, Keith tears an ear’s worth off the loaf and settles an elbow against the counter. His fingers flex. “So?”

Shiro looks back; his mouth tilts. “So.”

This earns him a sidelong scowl, a harder tug. “You know what I meant. What about the Teythra?”

"Tey'thra. Teythra is the planet, and Arahtyet’s the country.” The whole thing has the flavor of a joke slung under human radar, but Arahtyet’s minister of galactic relations, bright-beaked and bespectacled, bustling with cheer and historical context, had been in no hurry to explain. “You have to pronounce the apostrophe when you’re talking about the citizens or the capital city. The minister’ll probably won’t mind the next time he sees you, but we might as well keep him happy.”

Keith lisps briefly and nastily under his breath. "Why would anyone  _pronounce_ an apostrophe?” Ruthless as a dragon, he digs into the pan to crumble a second piece. “Whatever. Did the princess find anything about the ritual or not?”

“According to the last castle records, the dragons were still running pretty wild ten thousand years ago. As far as _ancient rituals_  go, it’s probably pretty new.”

Like something out of a fairytale: for centuries, the dragons have been dying in the wild. Only the Tey'thra stand vigil against their extinction, cultivating the necessary genetic variations to produce brood after new brood, to incubate and hatch each generation. Notes in a rite, one after another set as if in crystal—with one catch. No generation of dragons takes the same diet. The earliest flights took Teythra’s equivalent of deer; but dragons across generations have fed on shows of blood and battle, on human anger, on rare wild peppers and gemstones and fresh laughter and tea steam. There’s no telling what Hai and Dai and Midori will want—but the species has been practical in its appetites when kept. Every generation’s been able to find what they needed within the library walls.

“What about our timeline?”

"It sounds like Allura’s got everything handled for now. The empire’s shown some interest in this area, but the systems out here are a lot better organized than most: so far, they’ve managed to keep the Galra scouts from reporting anything worth taking. Pidge, Hunk and Lance are doing a sweep along this galactic circuit to see what we can do about the initial outposts. As long as we find what the dragons need in one month, we should be able to finish the Trial without getting off-schedule.” He cocks his head, smooths a thumb along the clench of Keith’s palm until it eases. “What’s wrong?”

Keith lifts his head. "You’d tell me if we didn’t have time,” he says. It isn’t a question.

“Keith,” Shiro says, and stops for the sound. Strange, that. He hadn’t missed Keith in the belly of the arena, with grit and blood caking scars under his nails. Hadn’t thought of anything but the bodies crowded behind him, the hungry, knife-eyed looks of the crowd,  _someday, someday_  glowing through his bones like coals. But here-and-now’s a different world: frost-pale, hushed with the must of old books, spoiling himself on a name just to get Keith to look at him: ruthless and pilot-sharp, a condensed focus bright as a solar flare. “You know I would. But we’ve been through the physical tests that they used on every champion in the last few centuries—”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t be here. I just—want to be prepared.”

With Keith, it’s a remark as much about what he’s voiced as what he hasn’t.  _Prepared_ , he says, and means,  _to leave them for a better cause._  “This kind of work,” Shiro says, “isn’t about numbers. We do the work that’s in front of us. If we hadn’t landed when we did, the Tey'thra would’ve chosen someone else—but they asked us to take care of their Trial. We’re not going to leave before we do.”

“Even if it means putting the fate of the universe over the fate of one planet?”

Moral absolutism, Shiro thinks, come too soon. It’s almost funny—all of Keith’s demands for justice, for black-and-white lines and the chance to do  _right_ , when justice’s only meaning is to be kind.

“Let’s not think about that just yet,” he says. “We do have time. The Galra Empire’s last big expansion in this direction was about two star-systems away, fifty years ago. I’m guessing rumors about Teythra’s cloaking tech hasn’t gotten back to them yet.”

Rumors of the cloak had dragged them across a light-year’s worth of space. If it could hide a planet, what couldn’t it do for Voltron, for the planets that the Galra hasn’t yet scanned out of empty infinity? But Teythra’s been fractured with a century’s string of petty wars; the countries which could unlock the device have tumbled to separate sides, stripped of the authority to access its strength.  _But if we could prove our divine right to lead_ , Arahtyet’s minister had said with ink-eyed blinks. _If we had but champions who could prove our will in Trial._

Keith doesn’t answer, and it clicks. “But it’s still,” Shiro says, “bothering you.”

Their eyes catch.

"It doesn’t matter,” Keith says.

From the cupboards, metal squeals with the thrash of little wings. Dai slams out in a scrambling hurry, tumbles battering against Shiro’s shins before she eels around his ankles and up into Keith, singing trill after indignant trill. They do play favorites, Shiro thinks—but not without reward: at once, Keith’s on his knees as she crowds up against him, all muffled paws and arching spine.

“ _Hey_ ,” Keith says, and scoops her up. In an instant she’s sprawling and coiling all along his arm as he strokes a line down her snout. Taps her nostrils after a beat, a musician fumbling his opening chord. But the dragon sneezes, bumps back against a knuckle as she twists up against him. “Come on—it’s just a closet. All right? You’re okay. Calm down.”

Boy and dragon, both of them unsettled: she all fangs and bright lashing tail; his arm banded around her the way you’d cradle an armful of books, or worse. Intimacy like nitroglycerin. And still his brow’s smoothing as she paws at his shirt, his lips quirked with a sunstruck secret. A slight moment, just so: trills winding into slow murmurs, haloed in the shallow burn of a winter morning.

Shiro shuts his eyes, thinks back to the black of empty space. A warm hand, a speckled window in another world. He stands quiet, holds his breath.

##  *****

Days, days, days. The dragons reject waterfowl and rarer birds; they flare their wings and hiss away the prospect of anything bloodless. Midori wolfs down a sacred loaf in a fit of jealous pique after shadowing Keith through dessert; she chokes it up onto his pillow again in the dark. On their twentieth day, Shiro makes the second call out to the minister, measuring the list of additional supplies they’ll need for the stay. Within the hour, packages are puffed to the crest of the volcano by parachute: sleek-furred blankets spilling over with the sleep-sweet scent of chamomile, loaves in silvery tins which steam to the touch, and a few pieces carefully modeled after Earth technology, including a shimmering disc that boots up on the calling station into—

“Is that  _The Lion King_?”

Shiro’s grinning—he hasn’t been able to  _stop_ since the screen flared neon. He wonders if the FBI’s jurisdiction extends out across light-years these days. “Arahtyet really likes the idea of intergalactic alliances. They collect everything that other cultures send into space while waiting for them to advance to a point for contact. They picked up all the shuttles we shot out for the last few decades—apparently they’ve been pretty concerned that a species could’ve achieved flight without mastering the visual recording technology to send a formal message.”

“Well,” Keith says, with a side-eye fit to scorch sand. “Guess all the dead monkeys NASA kept shipping out didn’t exactly convince them we knew what we were doing.”

Shiro snorts, dropping onto the couch beside him. Their knees knock together; Keith nudges him back with a vengeful hip. “Just be happy they took a large sample of movies after they traced the packages back to the right planet. If they paid attention to cultural significance, we’d be watching  _The Crucified Lovers_ and _Contact_  right now.”

Keith looks at him with the pity of a childhood spent in happy ignorance of anything more culturally significant than  _American Idol_. It’s a lot of judgment to take from a boy with a hairstyle that the eighties would’ve described as  _retro_. “I don’t know what that is,” he says, “and I’m just going to pretend you don’t either.”

Shiro bumps arm to arm, comfortable in his broad slouch and his terrible tastes. “We’ve proven that regular food probably won’t work,” he says. “Stories are usually the next step. A movie takes us through a range of emotions and reactions. If our dragons can feed on feelings of triumph or tears, this is probably a good way to find out.”

At once Keith pulls away; his brows twitch and lock. “Are you trying to warn me that you’re going to cry when Mufasa falls off the cliff?”

“Hey, I didn’t say I  _cried_ ,” Shiro says with hasty dignity, and flicks off the lights. “Let’s just—watch.”

They herd all three dragons onto the battered couch, which obliges them by puffing and pooling its cushions out to hold them in its nestling warmth. Midori sprawls over Shiro’s lap, kneading whenever the orchestra swells. Dai and Hai have tangled into a doze by the time Nala knocks Simba back into the long grasses. This doesn’t stop all three dragons from spending three days discreetly  _pouncing_ Shiro’s boots from behind every corner.

“It was your idea,” Keith says.

##  *****

One week winds into another. The minister spends their second call before they can take it, peeping bird-anxious through the chrome-sleek screen for further requests, reports, any explanations as to the delay of Voltron’s vaunted knights. Keith nearly snarls him off the line for wasting their contact point for the week; it takes an hour’s talking to settle his feathers. But Arahtyet’s like that—tipped to extremes: its flatlands flame and swelter beneath heavy summers; its winters paint cliffs and firs and towers alike in pale sheets and crystal. Its parliament fidgets and shrieks for the slightest upsets; its flavors roll hot across the tongue; its knights stage ritual fights with venom-smeared lances. Given a longer leave, they could’ve held out for spring, for a chance to wander its capital in the spring and see the fights for defending honor in the  _zaj_ pits. Keith might’ve liked that.

But that would’ve been a different world.

Three weeks. They lock down the calling station instead, reserving their next call for emergencies. Keith takes a vine-clingy Midori out to the little boats as he hauls heap after heap out of the library back to his own room. Shiro fumbles with old tape recordings and snatches of lullabies, brews every old recipe that’s ever succeeded. A fresh storm breaks over the crest of the volcano in the night, burying the highest crags in dreaming white drifts. No human could cross its ice.

The light-footed dragons, on the other hand, are delighted by the chance.

“They’ve been out there for a pretty long time,” Keith says. Leaning against a bedpost, Shiro looks up from a silver-stitched tome to Keith’s fists knotted along the sheets, bunching tension, the latest book splayed forgotten over his lap. The window frames Midori and Hai mere feet away, pawing down the glassy slope as the sun slips into a thinly-knit dusk. Haunches riding high, Dai stares cat-eyed at a drift bigger than she is; with a delicate flick, she wings and kicks it over, only to overbalance and go tumbling.

Shiro snags his shoulder just before Keith lunges off the bed. “ _Easy_ , tiger,” he says, warm against Keith’s fierce-eyed staring. Keeps a thumb smoothing along the jut of a tendon until its thrumming unstrings and gives way. In the same beat, Dai’s wings blaze up from beneath the drift; with icy lungs, she shrills something lizardly obscene. “They know what they can take. See? We’ll call them inside as soon as they start looking like they’re getting cold.”

A sound grits in Keith’s teeth, spills out in crumbs. Without a word, he splays fingertips across the metal knuckles; his head jerks down.

Inhale, exhale. Sunset leers red across his black-hinged fingers. Shiro stares. Keith’s skin gleams pale as origami. His clavicle’s an empty stretch: blood beneath a paper sheath, tendons strung thin as thread. A twist, a tightening pinch could crack the bone—and there’s his pulse working mere inches away. A target left for the taking. _A fish hook, an open eye._

Thought after thought shivers through his grip; but there’s no tremor as Shiro pulls away. “Not,” he says aloud, sinking back, “that it’s not good to see you worry once in a while.”

Before he can think to rise, Keith’s rolled from the edge. Crawls over to drop against him, shoulder-blades clashing with all his tensing weight before he settles. “Ugh,” he says: the off-duty cadet’s version of  _yes, sir_. Another book splits over his knees in a wild flutter; page after page whispers with his flicking. “Stop squinting.”

One fist slackens. Flesh and bone. Anchored. Easy. “It does get kind of hard to see in the dark.”

“It’s not that dark. Keep doing that and you’re going to go blind pretty fast.”

"Usually there’s a couple steps before blindness. You don’t think I’d look good with glasses?”

“I don’t think it matters. You’d be the same.”

“Ouch,” Shiro says, and nearly means the smile that curls with it. “There goes my ego.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Keith says—reels the words off quick, a fisher hauling at an old line. Restless, he sweeps back his hair; a knuckle bumps Shiro’s skull. “People say  _you look good this way_ when they mean  _you’ve changed, and I like this better_. But you’re,” he bites down the next syllable, chewing over its bones. “You’re already as good as it gets. Nothing you do’s ever going to change that.”

A cloudy beat. Shiro’s hands strain and flatten against the sheets. Outside, the dragons are batting at glazed towers, mowing moats through the trampled slush.

Abruptly Keith raps the page, steams a snarl in his teeth. "It’s like being back at the Garrison with the fifty-year-old piloting manuals. Why doesn’t anyone who writes a book ever just say what they  _mean_?”

Temper frothing after temper for small obstacles, little troubles. He’s felt like this before, once. The memory blurs at the backs of his eyes. A dusty windshield under a heat-staggered night. The Garrison jackets piled beneath their heads. Soda fizzing lukewarm fireworks on his tongue. Hercules spilling out overhead, and Vega, Deneb, Altair in a triangle, anchoring the season. Knuckles flattening and steepling under his open palm, and whisper after whisper under the dark—

“Keith,” Shiro says, careful. Like caution could cage the memory for him. “You know we’ve narrowed down a lot of options. We’re not that far off track for the standard Trial timeline. We’ll find the answer.”

“That’s not—“

“The problem,” Shiro says. “Then what is?”

Even unseen, the glowering answer fires out like an engine’s roar. Abruptly Keith straightens, tipping all his warmth with him. “Don’t laugh,” he says. “All right?”

“All right.”

“I woke up early this morning,” Keith says to his knees, to the fists grinding white in his lap. “And I went over to get Dai, Hai, and Midori out of bed. They made that noise they always do in the mornings, and for a second, I just—forgot. I forgot that we weren’t supposed to be here.” It comes out raw, a confession scraped to bone. “It feels real sometimes.”

 _Real_. They’re awake; they’re here; they’ve a duty, sure as a weight hooked into their backs. That’s never been in doubt. But it doesn’t take a question to get it—that  _real_ means something different to a boy who’d drifted from house to house as he’d grown, cast off to drift every time, wandering like something in an endless dream. Every lost kid carries with them the same singular question.

"You’re real to them,” Shiro says, quiet. He’d grown up in a drowsy off-shoot of a wilder city; childhood had tucked  _tadaima_ and  _okaeri_ under his tongue like pearls. It’s not like he has the words to bridge the distance—but that’s no reason not to try. “And you’re not the only one. Sometimes I think I could forget, too.”

Back Keith turns, staring across the sheets. Outside, evening’s hollowing the star-freckled sky; its thready shadows masks his mouth and brows, hollows his eyes to blank panes. He doesn’t speak, and doesn’t have to: a hand lashes across the sheets and Shiro catches it like reflex. Holds on as their fingers fumble to lace and wind, nails trailing veins, thumb brushing a knuckle—as constellations burn beneath his eyelids.

 _Oh_ , Shiro thinks. It’s a question they can’t afford, and here he stands at the cusp, a man in wait. A hand’s weight could pull him over the brink.

And still they hold on: constellations and galaxies and light-years from home, together in the sinking light.

##  *****

Later: Shiro wakes.

Wakes, wakes,  _wakes_ —tells himself that and keeps telling it, like a story that’ll spin itself true. Night inks bars across the glass, stitches the stars into eyes along the pane. Cage after cage, every gap watched. The dark’s leering. The cot’s gone wide, gone soft, but there’s still muck crusted under his nails, bindings set to anchor every limb. His pupils jitter, won’t hold; his bones ache like things cracked and stitched again. He swallows and the flex rolls arena-sand hot onto his tongue. He jerks, same way that he has time and again, and his wrists ring against the crackling manacles; the flicker of each finger crackles and flares with new force as he shakes, burning and roiling and  _alive_ , and if he just waits for the night-guard to pass, if he dares for once to snap the weights strung around him—

 _No_.

Teythra. Arahtyet.  _Keith_.

They’ve slumped around him, sheets and snaking coils knotted into a living cage. The dragons’d kept playing well into dusk. In the end, Keith had to haul them in one after another, dangling each set of squirming wings before the heater while they shrieked in high, gaudy chords. Dai and Hai had chased him back to the bedroom, snapping at his heels in the way they’d learned to do in a sulk. Only reading had coaxed them back to peace: the measured rise and fall of their champions’ voices, telling stories of the plants and buildings and lives that they’d grow to see. Dai slid a grudging, spaded tail around Shiro’s hip and thigh while he read names and the tangling uses out of various entries from the  _Comprehensive Horticultural Guide to the Urt Empire_ ; Hai and Midori draped over his calf and hip shortly after, clumped all around his thighs in a draconic belt.

_Guess there’s finally one place where they finally like you better._

_Well, they’ll make good references if I ever need to get hired for a job as a pillow._ The curl of muscle; a ghost’s constellated smile. _What about you?_

A gold-lit world of books and dragons mumbling. Elsewhere. Here, now, the light drains from his arm—leaves the pulse of sheer  _need_ beating black through the numb metal. Shiro stares, folds each finger, grinds the tips into a metal palm and feels the jut as if through ice.  _Cut and burn and rend, Champion. You were broken and reforged. Finish a task that a knife can understand._

“Shiro?”

An empty cry—an animal’s begging, throat bared—

No. A name.

A jagged push slings him out of bed. Grumbling and night-blind, three scale-sleek bodies thrash and slither together under the sheets, coiling into a warm knot in the space where he’d lain. Only Keith’s blinking through the thin moonlight: all tufts and an unlaced frown, grinding a knuckle between his brows as he sits up. Bare-handed, his pulse seething beneath the skin. All his shields sunk and lost with the day.

"Go back to sleep,” Shiro says. Breath after breath runs smoke-raw in his lungs—he chokes them down to whispers. He can’t look at his hands. “I’m just heading out to the other room.”

Between them, a restless silence arches and yawns.

“You’re going to get Dai out looking for you.”

“I was,” but a fist locks at his side, and every last word grinds to powder. Shiro sets his teeth to it. Syllable after syllable. “I was the one who cleaned up that pillow she shredded. You’re not going to convince me she can murder furniture and can’t get from room to room on her own.“

He turns, walks, doesn’t stutter once with the silhouettes swaying around him, real and unreal. Every step clicks, shadow-black on white tile; the air burns winter-still. Inhale, exhale. The Black Lion’s strength fuming like a coal at the back of his skull. He knows where he is.

Sheets rustle, the sleek murmur of furs flung back. “Hey,” Keith says, and his heels skim the cool floor in unraveling whispers. "Are you okay?”

An instant. A heartbeat’s notice and he’ll be snared and caught and cornered. Darkness makes a bare kind of cover; a good opponent would take the span of his open back like an invitation. Shiro bows his head; his fist grinds against the door handle. “It’s nothing that I can’t keep under control. We can talk about it once the Trial’s over. I’ll sleep in the other room. You’ll be fine.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Keith.”

That stops them, each in his place. He’s holding his breath like a diver waiting in deep waters, holds until his lungs strain red, red, red beneath the black. It’s better this way—better to keep quiet, leave a line of tiles stretched between them, made vast as the sky by the desperate, blinded night. Better for Keith to have every practical excuse not to follow, to pretend that there’s something in him that can be made whole again by any hands but his own.  _Hold me fast and fear me not_ —but that was a song, and a lie besides. On the outskirts of war, a soldier mends himself or falls back.

“You really think you’re going to hurt me?”

“I wouldn’t try to, Keith. But I could fail. Don’t tell me that you don’t see the risk.” Quiet, and for once Shiro can’t imagine the vision at his back—whether Keith’s knuckling fists at his sides, biting back the bark in his throat, the snap that comes so easy. Lower, he says, “You know I’d stay if I could.”

 _If_ , strung between them like a jewel threaded onto a hook.

“I trust you,” Keith says. It sounds simple—but he’s good at that. Driving words into absolutes. Religions have struck fires out of lesser lights. “You know that?”

The latch skids up; the door parts without a sound. Against the frame, Shiro spares one look back.

From the hallway spills the hazy pearling of the evening lamps; these do nothing to soften Keith’s angles: those stone-stark eyes, his jaw cut sharp on fury, the wrists that had once jutted so absurdly for his matchstick bones. Somewhere in the unconsidered span of years, he’d grown out of sullen gangling, the stray’s wild glares, into something else entirely. Steady and strange and familiar at once, a galaxy’s worth of complications held under the same frame. The wavering turn to his mouth, the way a sigh can shudder through it. Clenched shoulders and pulled punches, braced not for defense but against every instinct to attack. Each hipbone a slope that Shiro could trace with a thumb in his sleep.

“I know,” Shiro says. That’s simple, too. “That’s why I’m not going to risk it.”

He slips through the door: lets shadow after shadow crowd him down the hall, and doesn’t listen for the latch’s click behind him.

##  *****

Twenty-three days.

Allura assembles their strategy with drawn, pale brows before Shiro can put the question to her: three members of Voltron will be sufficient for the initial skirmishes with the Galra outposts. It’s no mercy, and not without its costs; but it buys them two more weeks to finish the Trial.  _Even as a matter of politics_ , she says, bell-clear through the station’s dreamy, pearled static,  _we have no right to withdraw. We promised this planet Voltron’s aid; whether we succeed or not, we more than owe it to them to see it through._

It’s typical of her kindness to treat the matter as a collective failing, and not as Shiro’s loss: his blind fumbling for a key fallen beneath his fumbling, open hand. He thanks her, lets the call fade, and goes to find the dragons.

Something along the way broke the bones of their morning rites, crippled their hours and left them limping on. Dai and Hai wake later, later with every sunrise; even Midori’s slower where she winds herself about their feet. It takes both of them at work to nudge and coax three tiny dragons through the daily routines, the walks and games and stories. After staggering back into the caverns, the dragons heap onto one another in coils, drift into a lingering doze before the automated heater.

Together they watch, fuming and searching and waiting, waiting, waiting.  Night after night, Shiro takes his leave last in the dark, and sleeps alone.

##  *****

“They said the answer’d be somewhere in here. The ministry tested  _both_  of us. They wouldn’t have sent us looking for the answer if they didn’t think we could find it.”

Shiro doesn’t turn, flicking through his rucksack in a last rough inventory. Water, heat-packs, nutribars. The ministry’s kept them well-stocked. “We’ve shut down the calling station for inbound calls. I’ll be back in a few days. Hopefully we’ll have more to work with from there.”

“ _Shiro_.”

Twenty-five days—no. Twenty-six. Time’s an easy blur when every hour winds back to the same argument, to Keith dogging him through the lead-quiet halls, all sharp strides and strangling hands, their shadows dragging empty behind them. “I wouldn’t try this if we were being watched,” Shiro says. A blanket next, furled into a tight roll before he slides it in.  “But we’re running short on time. Thanks to their last geographical survey, I’ve got a pretty good idea of their terrain. At my speed, the nearest calling station’s about two days away on foot. Once I’ve contacted the castle, Allura can run interference for us. If we can just get any of the last champions to confirm how they found the answer, it’ll give us some idea of what to expect.”

“You think we’ve just been missing some kind of  _trick_?”

With Keith, as always, it’s easier to talk about action and practicality than any reason. Reasons only matter if they work. "Have to admit,” Shiro says. “A hundred-percent success rate over a few thousand years? It’s a little hard to buy.”

He swings the pack to test its heft. Against the door, Keith folds his arms. “Try that again. Maybe make it sound convincing this time.”

Juxtaposition: Shiro arguing to crack the old rules while Keith clings to them. It’s a wonder, a karmic flicker, a universal punchline that might have dredged up a laugh elsewhere. Not here. “I’ve looked through the records,” Shiro says. “Over centuries, the Tey'thra have only taken a handful of off-planet champions. Their tech just doesn’t know how to handle anything other than a major brainwave dysfunction when it’s scanning for compatibility. It’s possible that they missed something about us.”

A beat; the quiet flayed bare.

"About me?” Keith says, like a match flaring. “Or about you?”

_The dragons will answer to a champion’s heart._

“Can’t tell me it didn’t cross your mind,” Shiro says, and smiles because he has to. There’s a desert night still running somewhere beneath his marrows, rooted in his spine. He will rust, he will rot—but not that. “You’re smart, Keith. You’ve seen what I do. As long as I’m around, we can’t take my going rogue as an  _if_. One of these days, I’m going to hurt someone. The one thing we can do is keep the damage down. If I’m the problem, taking me out of the equation could stabilize the dragons. At the very least, it’ll give us a clue to get started.”

“You’re not worried about hurting just  _anyone_. Say it.”

“Right,” Shiro says, too quiet. “One of these days, I’m going to hurt you.”

He crosses the room, and Keith turns to meet it. Eyes like the twist of a pommel under a knight’s hand, a blade’s starry flash. “Yeah,” he says, every word gone to steel. “I know that. Now tell me how’s that  _new_.”

The air twists in Shiro’s lungs—fractures, at last, like a laugh.  _That shouldn’t be your question._  It shouldn’t be anyone's—but of course it is. The lost kid’s gospel: the world’s out to hurt you, and will. The only question’s opportunity. The things you let it do to you. When you choose to lay down your shields.

“There’s two of us,” he says instead. “That has to make a difference this time. Most Trials only involve one champion. As long as you’re still with the dragons, that should dilute the impact. I’m not saying it’s not a risk—"

“I know it’s a risk. Because if you go, then I’m going too.” His head cants back, a smoker’s angle;  an elbow rattles the door as his arms fold tighter. “Are you kidding? It took us three days  _without_ the snow just to make it out here. Three days without you—that’ll kill them. Why should we make it  _slow_?”

“Keith.”

He means it, means more—but Keith’s voice overrides his, rises in a surge. “You don’t get to  _do_ things halfway. Either we’re playing by the rules or we have to leave them. And if the dragons aren’t worth saving, then it’s just about the numbers. Voltron’s been out of commission for a month. The only reason the Galra haven’t hit this sector’s because they’re already taking over somewhere else. How far do you think Zarkon’s gotten by now?”

Talking and talking, a tide that won’t break or pull back. Iron flickers on his tongue, at the edges of his teeth, ringing and ringing beneath each breath, metal enough to choke him. “ _Listen to me_ ,” Shiro says, a bite short of snarling, and feels the last of Keith’s answers crack with the sound.

In the collapse, he exhales.

“We can’t,” he says, because there’s nothing else. There’s nothing in him left to promise better, to promise more than this. “We can’t afford to think like that. We’re not just out to win here, Keith—there are no acceptable losses.”

Keith jerks his eyes down. A shudder wrings his fists tight. "Then where do you fit in?”

 _I don’t._ It barrels past all his guarding, his steady temper, on the tip of his tongue and the brink of spoken, the only answer he’s got left. He wants to say it. In an infinite universe, they’ve finite time, limited senses, and a dwindling number of futures open for the taking. The light patterns of millennia, strung up on timelines and left to be hung. That’s nonsense, of course, barely real thought, a string of images gutted and whirling in skeletal disgrace. Like all the old songs and stories that keep drifting out of his fraying memory, framing and reframing them.  _You think justice and winning are the same thing. I didn’t ask you to follow me. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have asked. We aren’t soldiers. Don’t ask me to teach you about loss._

Here’s the end, the choice, the close to which every Trial winds: either the dragons live or they don’t.

The pack thumps to a side. "When did you grow up?” Shiro says. He doesn’t mean it kindly, and Keith takes it like a real blow: eyes wide, all the tension snapped from his steeling jaw.  _Match the impact—don’t brace yourself against something you can’t take._

“You know when,” he says.

Shiro exhales, steadying. In and out, out, out; in and hold. There’s only so much he can take. “War can’t be just one battle after another. It’s not a win for anyone if you come back too changed to recognise what the victory’s supposed to mean.” But that’s a platitude—a card to press up between his own framing ribs. It’s no answer at all for Keith, waiting with his bitten lines and his knife-edged staring. “Listen to me,” he says. “Just listen. All right? I should have asked you. If you think the answer’s with us, in here, then I won’t go.”

Another impact: the silence sings with it.

“Somewhere along the line,” Keith says, “you started telling yourself it’d be okay if you disappeared. You still think that.”

“I know it’s not.” They’re talking in murmurs, scraps and slight breaths snatched out of the library’s frost-spangled quiet. He presses both hands on either side of Keith’s head like anchors, metal and flesh in the same watered light.  _Careful, careful,_ ready to step away at the half-start of any flinch—but Keith’s looking nowhere else. "Let’s take it a step at a time,” Shiro says, low. “I’m here right now. Can you trust me on that?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you believe that I’m not going anywhere without you?”

It takes a moment. The door shudders beneath a heel’s uncalculated jolt. The bigger movement: Keith reaching up, palming metal, the weight of movement pulling tight against the jutting black knuckles. “For now,” he says, dark-eyed. “I want to.”

“Now’s all I’m asking for. We’ll hold onto that. I can't—” Shiro says, halting. “I can’t promise you that things are going to change. But I’ll tell you before I go.”

It can’t be enough. It won’t: Keith’s a realist, born for victories and moral absolutes, a kid at the core still clinging to an old gospel of sorrow after sorrow, the weaknesses you hide and the ones you learn to take. But his head bows to it; his fingertips clench tight. “I know,” he says—and maybe Shiro’s miscounted after all, miscalculated what it means to get used to loss.  _Tell me how that’s new_ , he’d said: they’ve lost each other once before.

Causes are lost from two sides.

There’s an answer clouding on Shiro’s tongue—but sound, for once, works faster than thought. Keith’s first to bolt from the door,  twisting to face it even as Shiro’s fingers curl, reeling him back into open space. Together they hear it: a thin chirrup; the leathery pounding of little wings.

“They woke up,” Keith says, too blank. “They’re  _awake_. Did they find something without us? How could they—”

His grip sways, hand clinging to hand. No resistance on either end: only the flecked warmth of an ember, a hearth’s quiet lifeline. Anger, they’d said: old love confessions, scraps of bacon-fat, the peculiar green milk which oozed from certain western fruits. Dragons have eaten anything, everything, but they take in the end what their land needs most.

Slowly, slowly, a knotted sigh comes loose from his lungs. “I think I might have a guess,” Shiro says.

##  *****

The castle gets the first call; the minister’s their second. Together they set the ritual’s end in six days’ time. Just long enough to keep an eye on the dragons as they feed, confirm that all’s well.

(“How’s feeding them even going to work?” Keith says between calls, brows stitched with doubt. Midori’s wound herself into a shimmering manacle at his feet, binding each ankle to a chair’s leg; she hisses with all her wintry fangs whenever he shifts. “Do we have to fight  _every_  time?”

A smile skirts the corner of Shiro’s mouth. He taps Keith’s knuckle. “I think they’re more interested in the results.”

Keith stares. Shapes the first gap of an answer—and at once his lips pinch thin; he pulls back with the air of a general making a dignified retreat. The mask might’ve held, even, but for the red skimming the curve of each ear. The nitroglycerin of  _feeling_ , still—he remembers that much.

It gets easier, or it will; but that too needs time.)

Even their slight worries turn out to be rootless. In three days, the dragons are up and about again, knocking over tables and sofas, all bouncing, ungainly strides and gangling as they stretch and wheel and pitch over themselves. They take to making leaps from the library’s outcrops, winging ragged, desperate flights from shelf to overgrown shelf before retreating to nestle and nap before the heaters in the afternoons. In a rare show of good faith, Keith tries reading them books about  _law_ and spotting venomous animals in the wild, plays pirated discs when the reading gets obnoxious; Shiro makes two calls in a day for oil to work into their growth-cracked scales—though, in all fairness, that’s less a matter of  _growing too fast_  than Midori’s uncured habit of pouncing around corners.

But the dragons are children first and always. By the fifth day, nature’s taken over—a discovery Shiro makes when he rounds the corner to find Keith staring at the door of his old bedroom, clutching at a bright-capped bottle of oil, a furrowing stare, and a storm’s worth of parental temper.

“She kicked me out,” he says in disbelief.

Shiro leans over him, rattles the door until he feels the latch snapped into place. Behind it wafts the chittering and crashes of dragons nestling into a conspiracy. He braces an arm against the frame, flashes a grin down at Keith’s angular scowl.

“Kids these days,” he says, light and wise and sorrowing. “They just grow up too fast.”

Keith flicks the bottle at his chest.

They wander the caverns together for an hour or two, snatching up torn feathers and reshelving stray books; but the dragons stay cooped up in a secret all their own. Whatever they’re doing, well—best not to interrupt. In the afternoon, Keith looks out to the withering ice, the wan yellow grasses drying in a trickle of sun. He squares his shoulders and jerks his chin to Shiro. They go out together, wandering between the footpaths that have resurfaced from beneath the dream-deep snowfalls. Young saplings bristle and feather against the skyline; black stripped branches sway like worked lace with their passing. Down they go, treading slush, circling around sugary patches where the season’s still clinging. With a smudgy memory of fifteen different Teythran encyclopedias, Shiro points out new seedlings, patches of marbled ground where old holy sites had been uprooted. Keith packs a snowball, hurls it into a tree.

In the evening, Keith warms one of the Tey'thran food-platters while Shiro stands a diplomatic distance away, eyes anchored to the corner. (“That plate actually burned faster when you watched it.  _How_?”) As the moon comes skimming through the fir-tops, they retreat to one of the rooms down the hall from the dragons’ new nest: a tiny attic of a space, walls lined with silk screens and tapestries, which houses one shelf and a sprawling couch turned to face a wide pane. Dusk sweeps its colors out, but the bay windows open into a vast landscape like an eye.

Together they settle into the cushions, watching the night wake star by star. Keith leans against his arm, talks him through the constellations, threading strange, trembling galaxies into familiar shapes: there Taurus, his two horns twisted into a unicorn’s weapon from the new angle; Libra twisting at the corner of the frame, its scales tipping heavier than ever. All of Earth’s familiar stars, scattered but not gone.

If there’s a name for this, the hush stringing tight between his ribs, he lost the shape of it long ago.

Hour after hour dwindles away, shadows pulling across the carpet’s mazy coils. Keith yawns, and Shiro takes his cue. He gets up.

“Hey,” Keith says as he turns. “Can you turn off the light?”

At the open door, Shiro stops. He goes back—flicks off the wall’s single tear-round lamp. Steps away, the door’s waiting, and down the hall, the sure safe anchor of an empty bed. No dragon’s spines to jab him when he stirs or twists in the sheets; no boyish sleep-blurred mumbles in the dark. Easier than this—he has that lesson branded into his aching shoulder, his empty metal hand and the backs of his eyes.

It’s always easier to be a weapon.

“Shiro.”

Keith’s still resting along the curve of the couch, chin planted against his wrist. “Come on,” he says. “We could use the sleep.” Words held clear as a hearth-light. Waiting, still, in spite of everything they know. Not an order but a choice.

With gleaming fingers, Shiro presses the door shut.

##  *****

Thud. Thud.

Shiro blinks: once, and he’s awake. Dust prickles his lip in a dry mustache, and the motes sifting through the chrome frame spin gold-gold-gold. But another jolt rocks the door, shaking down a second powdery scattering; a dry, interested trill coils after the shower.. In all their draconic wisdom, neither Dai nor Midori’s taught Hai the intricacies of door-handles. The learning process, it seems, comes slower to some.

He elbows his way up, droops against the couch’s backing as he nudges a heel to the body hoarding a palace’s worth of pillows. “Hey,” Shiro says, gone morning-rough. “Looks like you’ve got a fan calling you.”

A groan crackles through the heavy blankets; at once, they curdle into a knot. Not one pillow escapes.

Sound  brims in his throat. Shiro’s eyes lid, and he lets it through: a faint puff of a laugh. A glimmering dawn stitches through his lashes, slides warm beneath his ribs with his next breath. “Up we get, tiger. Last day, remember? What kind of parent leaves without saying goodbye to his kids?”

"Before sunrise,” the knot grumbles as it twists towards the window, “they’re  _your_ kids.“

But a bedsheet’s no real disguise: here a sleep-rumpled head, there the jut of a shoulder-blade, a weapon of a body condensed into a curl of spine and limbs tucked-in. Elegant as a logarithm. He can’t help himself; a hand smooths the cushioning to palm the slope of his back, trailing each muffled vertebra like a thing to memorise. The blankets shift but don’t pull away. Fond and low, Shiro says, “Is that from The Lion King?”

“Do we have to talk about this  _right now_?” mutters Voltron’s red paladin, a sentimental Disney-weak blanket burrito exposed. A sleep-loose arm folds another layer over his face. “Even Iverson never made anyone get up this early.”

"Maybe I can think of something worth waking up for,” Shiro says, and  _hauls_ at the blanket. It unravels with a yelp, white flaring out as a boy tumbles into him, a flurry of skull and elbows and outraged knees. The resulting drowsy tussle rolls them across the cushions, grappling wrists and crushing the comforter into the sofa’s back. For once, Shiro wins the day—lands on top and takes advantage of the victory to hold him fast, palms framing either side of his head and a knee sunk between his thighs.

Keith stares up, a riot of cowlicks and dim glowering under a merciless sunrise. “Tell me this isn’t it,” he says. The knob in his throat jumps with his swallow.

In the desert, under the stars. A barracks hallway. Across the cafeteria, a steak-knife quivering inches from Shiro’s boots. Just outside the simulation doors, with  _flight_ caught electric in his eye for the first time. Over and over, he must’ve had a hundred chances before this—a thousand better moments to tell him anything. Elsewhere and elsewhen, in another world long buried with all its right reasons.

Here, now: under an alien dawn, Shiro leans down, presses the only answer into the sour skew of his mouth.

It isn’t an easy thing—but that’s all right. It’s enough.

##  *****


End file.
